Shadows Beneath: The Writing Excuses Anthology

by Brandon Sanderson, Mary Robinette Kowal, Dan Wells, Howard Tayler

  I nod. As predictions go, this makes perfect sense. There might be some small variations, but the end result sounds spot on.

  “So,” he continues, “the only way for us to make money is for us to be pre-positioned in other fields. That team is preparing us to capitalize on the disruptions introduced by an order-of-magnitude increase in human longevity.”

  “Oh, I get it. You’re not planning to get rich selling immortality. You’re going to get rich helping the human race make the transition to immortality.”

  “How valuable do you think this secret is?”

  “In numbers? I can’t count that high. You don’t need to be protected from competitors. You need to secure yourself against governments. They’ll break all their own laws and empty their treasuries to control this, if they think they can.”

  “Exactly.”

  I shake my head sadly. “Sir, my team is good, but if a sovereign state decides to pull a hostile takeover, the only thing we can do for you is shoot you before they have a chance to begin interrogating, and they’ll probably just take us down before we see them coming. You need an army, and a bunker.”

  “Those aren’t realistic options.”

  “Oh, I know that. I’m already contemplating expanded perimeters, plainclothes agents, dead-man-switch alarms. And of course I’m even more concerned about why you pushed the panic button.”

  “Yes . . . about that. The intruder . . . I never described him to you.”

  “I figured you’d get around to it.”

  “It was Death.”

  I went into the Marines when I was eighteen, bright-eyed, broad-shouldered, and ready to save the world. Most of that idealism got sanded flat in Afghanistan, but in the intervening twenty years I’ve determined that I don’t need to save the world. I just need to save good people. I started my own firm so I could be picky about my clients, and Sinclair Wollreich is the best man I’ve ever worked for.

  Which is why I’m aching inside. The bug in Wollreich’s office is a betrayal of trust, and I know that. He came clean with me, and I didn’t come clean with him. I could have told him about the bug, but I didn’t.

  I did, however, get him to agree to a physical the next day.

  I don’t know how you go about testing to see if someone is prone to hallucinating, or if something’s going wrong with their brain, but Tuesday morning’s checkup runs into Wednesday with no breaks. We’ve had eyes on Wollreich ever since he briefed me, and that’s meant double shifts. Triple for me. It’s proving to be a bit of a strain.

  It’s six a.m. on Wednesday. Barry has just checked in to let me know Wollreich is sleeping in today. Sleeping in sounds nice, but personal security for our CEO now means securing where he’s going to be, not just where he is.

  Mo and I are in the second-floor lobby having coffee with two other team members, Failalo and Jace. We’ve got a nice view of the buildings that stand between us and the sunrise. We’re not really securing anything right now, to be honest. We’re hoping the sunlight will perk us up a bit.

  “How long are we going to keep doing this, Cole?” asks Failalo. She’s soft-spoken, but nobody shortens her name to “Fail” more than once.

  “The extra shifts? Until HR and I can clear some more team members.”

  Mo sips at his coffee. “What’s the holdup?”

  “Well, if the event in Wollreich’s office was enemy action, probative or otherwise, then we’re up against somebody connected and equipped.”

  I’ve told my team that our boss saw an intruder, all in black, who then vanished. Mo’s theory is that it was a hologram made with lasers, but none of us have the background to research that. I didn’t tell them about the immortality drugs, or that our boss thinks he saw Death. And only Mo and Barry know about the camera we planted.

  “Oh, I get it,” says Failalo. “You think we’re being played. Somebody’s planted their own people among our candidates. They shoot some lasers through the window to spook us, we beef up, and now they’ve got peeps on the inside.”

  “That’s one scenario. They might also have our hiring pool bugged, tapped, and flagged on their end, so they can watch our background check process and find the holes in it. So yes, I’m concerned that somebody yanked our chain, and now we’re reacting instead of acting.”

  “Don’t go Princess Bride paranoid, boss,” says Mo. “Both cups might be poisoned.” He tosses back his coffee, swallows, then smiles broadly at me. “And there aren’t enough of us for a land war in Asia.”

  I’ve always loved that scene. I used to imagine how I would have handled things if I’d been in Vizzini’s shoes, and it was fun until I finally figured out that he’d been outplayed from the start. If Westley didn’t kill him, Humperdinck certainly would have.

  My phone chirps. It’s a text message from the phony wall plate, an alert to let me know the feed is active. The camera has seen something. The message looks innocent enough: “SUP YO. GO 4 EATZ?”

  Mo’s smile flattens. “Somebody miss breakfast?” He knows the codes.

  “Upstairs, now. Mo, you’re with me in the service elevator. Failalo, Jace, take a lobby elevator to thirty-one, then take the west stairs to forty.” I drop a ten on our table to take care of the barista who usually doesn’t have to clean up after us.

  On our way to the elevator, Mo places a call. “Hey, Sal. Mohammed here. Check electrical and find out if the lights just went on in Wollreich’s office.”

  Good thinking. Building security may not have cameras in Wollreich’s office, but there is a motion detector on his light switch, and the company monitors usage for conservation purposes.

  “Got it. Thanks.” He turns to me as we reach the elevator. “Lights just went on. They’re still out in the anteroom and the west hallway. Whoever turned on the office lights didn’t walk in the usual way. Also, the cameras on the rest of the floor haven’t seen anybody since Wollreich left with Barry at three a.m.”

  I key the elevator for a nonstop ride. The illuminated numbers count up quickly. Mo and I are silent, but we’re both listening.

  At forty the elevator doors slide open. That motion sets off the detectors, and the hallway lights come up.

  Mo moves to step out, but I stop him. Somebody got onto this floor and into Wollreich’s office, and we know nothing about them. They got here first, and might be expecting us. Maybe they spoofed the cameras and the motion detectors, but we can’t. Anywhere we go the lights will come up, so we can’t be stealthy.

  Then again, whoever spooked Wollreich the first time vanished pretty quickly, perhaps because they were afraid of us. If we’re slow we’ll miss them, and if they’re afraid of us, that might mean we’ve got them outgunned.

  Or maybe both cups are poisoned. Ah, Vizzini, how I hate being you. Just once I want to be the guy with the iocaine immunity and the winning plan.

  “We go fast. Straight to the office, then standard entry.”

  Mo nods, and we both draw and begin to run, weapons held low in two-handed grips. We run through two hallway intersections without clearing them properly, and each time I worry that I’m being a reckless idiot. But nobody shoots at us, and those intersections light up to the north and south, so nobody else came that way recently.

  We reach the office. Through the frosted glass the anteroom is dark. Not full dark, thanks to west-facing windows, but it’s oh six fifteen. I hear a soft tick as the lock pad reads my badge and unlocks the anteroom door.

  I’m in first, pushing the door open and sweeping with it to the left as the lights come up.

  “Clear,” says Mo.

  “Clear.”

  “Ting,” says my phone. Bluetooth connection, with data streaming in. We can look at that later.

  I key in my code for the door to Wollreich’s office. No frosted glass here, and the door is soundproofed. No way to know what’s on the other side.

  Tick. I grab the handle and push the door open, sweeping left while Mo goes to the right in the brightly lit office.

/>   “Clear,” says Mo.

  “And empty,” I say. Not that I expected to find anybody here, not really.

  Mo steps to the corner of the room where our cam dot should be. “It’s still there.”

  “I’m pretty sure there’s no point sweeping the rest of the floor.” I holster my weapon. “Let’s see if the camera saw anything.”

  I pull out my phone. Swipe, code, and then a tap on the spy app, whose icon looks like the one for a pizza place. I respond to the “ZIP CODE” prompt with an eleven-digit passcode, and up comes the video file. PLAY.

  The video begins with the room lit only by the brightening sky through the windows. Then a human-size shadow dissolve-wipes into existence in the middle of the room, backlit by those windows so I can’t make out any details the moment it appears, but the lights come up very quickly.

  “Holy shit,” says Mo.

  Hooded and all in black, the stereotypical, iconic representation of Death, complete with a scythe, stands in the middle of the office and turns to face the camera.

  We’ve got my phone casting video to the wall screen by the time Mr. Wollreich arrives in his office with Barry on his heels. Wollreich is flushed, there are bags under his eyes, and he’s angry. Barry has all the expression of a granite bust, which means Wollreich has been chewing him out on the way over here.

  “Cole, how long have you been spying on me?”

  “Since Monday morning, sir. I’m sorry, but it seemed prudent.”

  “Prudent? After the lecture you gave me about the value of secrets? Spying on me is a lot of things, but prudent is not one of them.”

  “With all due respect, sir, you called us in a panic, then lied to us. I made a snap decision in order to ensure that my team and I could keep you safe.”

  “How come you didn’t tell me about it later?”

  “Guilty conscience, sir. But I think you should watch this before we continue to discuss the matter.”

  “Fine.”

  I push PLAY, and Death appears onscreen.

  Wollreich gasps. “That’s him. Hot damn, Cole, you got him!”

  I push PAUSE.

  “We did, sir, but he’s about to start talking, and he talks fast. You really need to listen to this.”

  Wollreich nods, and I push PLAY.

  Death is facing the camera, and begins to speak.

  “Sinclair Wollreich and . . . friends,” he begins. The voice is deep, so it sounds masculine, but it’s almost musically artificial, like somebody auto-tuned Christopher Lee. “You must immediately cancel your organization’s life extension plans. Further, you must destroy the information related to it. Otherwise human beings will lose all access to the eternal realms.”

  Mo and I have already watched the whole thing. I had to explain to Mo that yes, the company was going to be extending human life. I watched it a second time while Mo called Barry and told him to get the boss in here. Right now I’m watching Wollreich, who is sneering and eyerolling, giving the screen his this-is-bullshit face.

  “The human spirit, or soul, is a turbulent waveform. At death, this turbulence allows the waveform to imprint across the boundary wave, transducing the wave to an eternal state with minimal degradation. As humans grow older, however, the turbulence is reduced. Some very old humans fail to imprint. Their original waveforms cease. In your terms, this means they die forever. Should human lives be extended to more than a century, very few humans will imprint successfully, and eternal life will be denied to your race.”

  Wollreich’s this-is-bullshit face gives way to deep concern.

  “You have the ability, Sinclair Wollreich, to end this project and save humans eternally. Act swiftly.”

  Death vanishes. A moment later, the video shows Mo and me bursting through the office door. Mo reaches up to check the camera, and the image freezes because I’ve pushed STOP.

  Wollreich is leaning against his desk, arms folded, head down.

  “Cole, could this have been faked?”

  “Probably. I’m not a video expert. But the second time I watched it I looked out the window. There’s a cloud that remained unchanged between the Death part and the part where Mo and I arrived. We could probably match that to other cameras in the building.”

  Wollreich straightens up.

  “Is that the only copy of the video?” he asks as he points at my phone.

  “There’s a copy in the transmitter too.”

  “And one in the cache on the wallscreen,” says Mo. “That one’s in dynamic allocation, though. Might already be gone.”

  “Bring me the transmitter, and then we’re all waiting in here for the brain trust.”

  Wollreich’s office is big. Even with nine of us in here it doesn’t really feel crowded. Tense, yes, but not crowded. Three members of the genius team have arrived, and one of them has video tools in hand. Two senior members of R&D are here as well, and they’re both scientist types, complete with the lab coats. Wollreich, Mo, Barry, and I are the only ones in suits.

  We’ve all watched the video.

  “This is spaghetti-monster stuff,” says Kurtzman, one of the labcoat guys. “It’s non-falsifiable. We can’t test any of what he told us. Sure, it sounds convincing because he used words like waveform and transducing, but there’s no science in here for us to check.”

  “Sure there is,” says Michel. He opens his case of video tools. “I need to see the camera, though.”

  Mo pulls it down from the corner of the room and passes it to Michel. It’s about the size of a pencil eraser.

  Michel turns it over in his hands and squints at it.

  “Yup! We have science. This camera sees in broad-spectrum. The transmitted video is standard HD, but the raw file has some goodies in it.” He takes the transmitter from the table, jacks a cable into it, and bends over his equipment. “This’ll take a few minutes.”

  Wollreich turns to Kurtzman.

  “The statements Death made are non-falsifiable, yes. We have no way to prove or disprove any of what we were told. Due diligence suggests that we at least consider the information, and that’s why you’re here.”

  “Can we call him something besides Death, please?” says Kurtzman. “That costume he was wearing was part of the message, and if we accept it at face value, we’re undermining our ability to evaluate any of this. Oh, and for the record, I think it’s a crank, and what we should be doing is grilling the hired guns.”

  When the boss is in a meeting I only speak when spoken to. My job is to be invisible. Under the current circumstances, that’s not going to work well.

  “Grill away, Mr. Kurtzman,” I say.

  “Doctor Kurtzman.”

  “My apologies, doctor. But please, grill us. Ask us anything. From your perspective, my team and I are your prime suspects. From our perspective, we need to get cleared as quickly as possible so that we’re free to continue doing our jobs.”

  “I’ve already got an independent agency running deep checks on you, Cole,” says Wollreich. “Your whole team, in fact. They’ve been doing it since Monday, when I brought you into the fold.”

  “Outstanding, sir.”

  Kurtzman looks stymied.

  “And Dr. Kurtzman,” Wollreich continues, “you’re absolutely right. We don’t call our intruder ‘Death’ anymore. He is the Intruder.”

  “I’m not quite sure how this video plays into any corporate espionage scenario,” says Lee, a stout woman in khakis and a Hawaiian print shirt. “I haven’t plugged any of this into our X-form, but I shouldn’t have to. The payoffs and strategies, the incentive matrix . . . those don’t change. This event, this monologue, it should align itself with existing player strategies, and it does not.”

  “Dr. Lee is a game theorist,” says Wollreich. “Without the jargon now, doctor?”

  “The X-form assumes rational and informed agents in the access tier. An irrational, uninformed agent might adopt the dress-like-death tactic in hopes of a payoff, but . . .”

  “I said without
the jargon.”

  “She means,” says Michel, “that we’re either dealing with an irrational, uninformed person with a stupid agenda, but who has access to our plans, or there are payoffs missing from the matrix.”

  “There aren’t any payoffs missing,” says Lee.

  “Let’s come back to that,” says Michel. “I have more video for you to watch.”

  He gestures at the screen. “This is the original image, with an overlay of neon-green representing UV frequencies all the way to the edge of the camera’s range.”

  On the wall-screen the video begins again, muted. It looks exactly the same as before, except a green shimmer appears in the middle of the room. It brightens, and then flashes as the Intruder appears. It then fades to a low shimmer again, surrounding his form as he speaks. The flash occurs again when he vanishes.

  “Michel, what does that mean?”

  “It means that the Intruder’s appearance and disappearance were accompanied by UV emissions.”

  “Michel,” says Lee, “those speakers in your office, the ones that build the audible cone out of interference patterns? Could somebody make a hologram by doing that with light? Like, ultraviolet lasers bouncing off each other just right to make a picture?”

  The hologram thing. That was Mo’s theory. I look at Mo, and he smirks.

  “Maybe,” says Michel, “but did you notice how there wasn’t any green in the sky outside the window, or in the sunrise reflections on the buildings across the street? These windows filter UV. Any laser that tried to beam UV through them would have to cut the glass to do so.”

  “Then how did the UV get into the room?”

  “Obviously it came with the Intruder,” Michel answers. “But what you really want to see is the infrared. Watch this. No UV this time. I’m only going to play the infrared channel.”

  The picture returns, and now it’s a monochromatic green.

  Several of us gasp when the intruder appears. Including me.

  I’ve seen infrared video of people before, and most folks have at least seen it simulated in movies. This is not that.

  The form under the cloak is clearly outlined, and asymmetrical. The torso is short, and high. The legs are too long, and appear to bend the wrong way. If there’s a left arm, it’s not showing up. The right arm reaches all the way to the floor, then up to head-height, where it ends in the scythe blade.